Gates And Crowley: A Lot Of Crimson Faces.

Time to weigh in on L’affaire Harvard Square or Gatesgate. I think respect was involved more than race. The Police don’t get any respect. They may save lives, but that doesn’t impact their status any more than it does for nurses. Being on the Harvard faculty, though, is like having your own respect machine. It produces honors, titles, privileges, money and, sometimes, even fame. Put a Cambridge cop and a Harvard professor in a room, add suspicion and you’ve got a volatile mixture at the best of times. This wasn’t the best of times.

We don’t really know what happened in the house at 17 Ware Street and we can’t trust either party’s version because there is a natural tendency to improve the story in retelling. Yet, something caused the situation to escalate from a mere false alarm to an incident. We do know that, returning from a long trip, Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. found his front door jammed and, with his driver’s help, broke his way in. Someone witnessed the break-in, reported it to the Cambridge Police and Sgt. James Crowley was dispatched to investigate. After that it gets fuzzy, but the consensus is that Prof. Gates engaged Sgt. Crowley and got a pair of bracelets in return. (You might call them an engagement present.) Why would Gates do that? You don’t need “street cred” to know that you don’t confront a police officer – especially when you’re under suspicion. If you don’t want to show respect, fear will do very nicely, thank you. On the other hand, why would Sgt. Crowley arrest a man, in his own home, for disorderly conduct? It’s not even domestic in nature because he lives alone. He wasn’t drunk or violent or destroying property or stopping traffic, so what would justify it? Being insulted? It’s possible that both men gave into temptation, but I would give the benefit of a doubt to Sgt. Crowley.

Police officers, chronically deprived of respect, must feel a strong temptation to enforce the law and their will at the same time. Especially when they have every kind of force, including deadly, hanging from their belt. Yet, surely they must be trained to resist such temptation, have techniques for dealing with provocation and rules for using force? Right? So, Sgt. Crowley would have to, at the very least, overcome some training to exploit his authority. Not so with Prof. Gates. We can be sure that the one thing they don’t teach at Harvard, to students or faculty, is humility. When the respect machine is going full-blast, it can easily drown out everything except the demands of ego and entitlement.

Still, it was an ugly, unnecessary situation and no one gets away clean. Sgt. James Crowley’s arrest was thrown out, he’s getting a lot of unwanted attention and has been insulted on a national - if not international – scale by the President of the United States, invitation for beer at The White House notwithstanding. As for Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., if he’s learned anything, it’s to be friendlier with your neighbors and let them know when you’re leaving town.